{"id":582,"date":"2012-10-02T19:50:40","date_gmt":"2012-10-02T19:50:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/WritingTutors\/?p=582"},"modified":"2012-10-02T19:50:40","modified_gmt":"2012-10-02T19:50:40","slug":"the-book-of-guardians-derek-neales-new-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/WritingTutors\/?p=582","title":{"rendered":"The Book of Guardians – Derek Neale’s new novel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Derek Neale\u2019s debut novel has been published by Salt. Set in the UK and Canada, The Book of Guardians <\/em>is a detective story for our time \u2013 the detective is no policeman but a cross between social worker and lawyer. It\u2019s his last case. He finds fathers for a living, grapples with domestic chaos and tragedy on a daily basis \u2013 just as well.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Derek says: \u2018The novel grew from an image \u2013 of a shed at dusk with birdsong rising from an adjacent \"\"<\/a>holly tree, a freshly watered seed tray by the shed\u2019s window \u2013 that\u2019s the key, something new growing from something dusty and overgrown. There was a woman with dark hair and a child, and a suspicion that Charlotte Bront\u00eb\u2019s Jane Eyre <\/em>was in some way bound up with events. And who was the child\u2019s father? Always a good question to ask.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a story about searching for mothers and fathers, for antecedents, about searching through memories to invent ourselves; getting lost then found in the labyrinthine myths we invent about our pasts and who we think we are. That\u2019s the grand version\u00a0 \u2013 but as Derek says, it\u2019s also \u2018just a detective story\u2019. He adds \u2013 \u2018it has another starting point, well it has many, but one of its other starting points was work I used to do as a freelance copy typist \u2013 trying to pay for my first word processor. I regularly typed up these reports for court guardians, about child care cases, and these struck me as incredible narratives, the form of them, chronologies and interviews sitting side by side to create novel-like sagas. That was my primary research. I thought about the cases, of course, but also I thought about what it was like to deal with such cases on a daily basis.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n

The result is \u2018an often touching examination of the philosophy of\u00a0 \u201ccare\u201d, which tackles head-on the alienation and uncertainty of contemporary lives\u2019, so says one reviewer. \"\"<\/a>Derek studied on UEA\u2019s MA in Creative Writing and has published stories in various anthologies and journals. The author of several articles and books about writing, he is Chair of The Open University\u2019s Advanced Creative Writing module (A363) and is currently the OU\u2019s Director of Teaching for English.\u00a0<\/p>\n

You can see more about The Book of Guardians <\/em>at Salt Publishing<\/a> and www.derekneale.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Derek Neale\u2019s debut novel has been published by Salt. Set in the UK and Canada, The Book of Guardians is a detective story for our time \u2013 the detective is no policeman but a cross between social worker and lawyer. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[112],"class_list":["post-582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-novels","tag-detective-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/WritingTutors\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/WritingTutors\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/WritingTutors\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/WritingTutors\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/WritingTutors\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=582"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/WritingTutors\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":591,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/WritingTutors\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582\/revisions\/591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/WritingTutors\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/WritingTutors\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/WritingTutors\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}